James an Rhiannon's scene was very effective at portraying the personalities of the lovers and was easily adaptable to add something in before or after. The only way I would change it is for James to have a slightly higher pitched voice as the lovers are supposed to be rather feminine so a higher pitched voice would be more suitable.
Lorna, Rob and Charlie's scene was extremely funny yet like James and Rhiannon's piece, it showcased the characters personalities remarkably! The only was I could see their performance being improved is during the sword fight between Brighella and Captain, they should be more vocal with Brighella shouting aggressively in Gromalot whilst Captain whimpers and screams cowardly in Gromalot.
When Ollie and I performed our piece, I performed it slightly differently with a better use of voice. I changed my voice so that I sounded a lot like an elderly man which relates to my character of Pantalone very well. I also spoke rather proudly and aggressively as Pantalone is a former Magnifico so I feel he would still act as if he was at the top of the Commedia Dell'arte status ladder.
Following this we got up and devised our first scene, the discovery of the body of Harlequin. Below is an outline of what happens in the scene:
- Brighella enters and finds Harlequin's corpse
- Brighella calls for help and Doctor enters
- Doctor checks for a heartbeat but finds nothing
- Pantalone enters, sees the body and asks who caused the death
- Doctor blames Brighella, Brighella blames Captain
- Captain enters and explains a battle between him and Harlequin's murderer
- Captain identifies the killer as Columbina
- Columbina enters, prides Captain on his physical strength and then blames Zanni
- Zanni wakes from he call of his name, runs to the group, approaches the corpse and then starts biting Harlequin's arm.
- Brighella pulls him off and Pantalone asks who killed him; Zanni blames Columbina
- The group start randomly accusing each other of the death of Harlequin with pointing gestures. (The diagram to the right depicts who points at who and when).
- Doctor ends the quarrelling and suggests that they try to resolve the matter diplomatically.
After running through this scene we discussed our plot line and which direction we wanted our performance to go in; we weighed up the options of how Harlequin could die. Would he kill himself? Would it be murder? Would it be planned or accidental? The ideas we had were our original idea of Zanni knocking him in an oven, Brighella accidentally killing Harlequin mid duel with Captain, or Harlequin choking on a mammoth mouthful of food. Lorna brought up an interesting idea of showing, in all of our individual/partner scenes (e.g. Pantalone & Doctor, Zanni) the process each character arranging the death of Harlequin but we actually don't see how he dies until the very end. Ollie conjoined onto this idea by saying that after this we can join all of the incomplete parts of these together to show how each tactic failed, obviously excluding the succeeding plan. This will bring all the scenes together fluently and explain everything clearly to the audience, therefore revealing the true result.
Next lesson, we will continue to polish off our opening scene and possibly move onto our other individual scenes.
Next lesson, we will continue to polish off our opening scene and possibly move onto our other individual scenes.
No comments:
Post a Comment